Whooper Still breaking the mould

Spoiler alert – I am not going to expose why Whooper is so fast. Instead I hope to shed some light on why she is as unconventional now as she was when she was launched and why for the second time in this series, I am writing about a creation of Jack Laurent Giles’.

is in fact the younger sister of a boat called , built to the same design back in 1938, so for the purposes of this article I will predominantly be talking about the first boat, although they was launched sporting some pretty unusual design features – shoal draught (a term not usually applied to a racing yacht now, less so in the late Thirties), a centreboard and deck stepped mast to name a few – and her quirks stood her out from the crowd at the time. Jack Giles had already made a name for himself with successful racing yachts such as , and the evergreen Vertue Class; this yacht would be another opportunity to show his credentials. The brief he received from ’s owner, Wilfred Pirie, was a challenge he seemed to relish. In a article published many years after the first boat’s launch, Giles cheerfully recollects what one can only assume was a period of highly focussed work and head scratching in the Laurent Giles office. In my article on back in September (CB 375), I illustrated the spirit of innovation that Giles exercised in his designs and I can hardly think of a boat more innovative than . Her arrival in 1938 must have been viewed with no small amount of scepticism when compared with the boats at the time – but more remarkable is that Giles originally conceived the design a decade earlier, back in 1927.